Anila's Journey

by Mary Finn

  “Help them with their chores,” she said. “You are too much on your own now but you’re no tiger. Not yet, anyway.”

  I didn’t know what she meant. But it was good, somehow, to leave the little brick house that was full of sadness and make my way down the rutted path in search of something else. Our lane joined one of the great old roads into the city but it was a noisy busy world of its own. My father always said that when he stepped off the road he was stepping into an India that his fellow Writers never knew was there.

  On the lane there was only one other strong house like ours, which was owned by a palanquin builder and his sons. Long clean planks of wood were always lined up against the front walls of this house. Round the back, where the earth was covered with wood dust and chippings, the boys hammered and sawed all day long, turning the longwood into the box-carriages without wheels that the English had come to love. They lined the most expensive ones with pith to keep the worst of the sun’s heat away from the passengers. The smells of wood and paint escaped onto the lane. The paint smell I especially liked. It went up my nose like oven smoke.

  I loved to slip into the yard and watch the eldest son painting the finished palanquins. He had a fine talent, I thought, able to fill in, using just a thin brush, fruit and vines or chains of tiny elephants or monkeys. Sometimes he simply drew the plainer decorations and lines that you would find picked out in stone on the big buildings in the city. He knew I was watching but he let me be. I think he liked an audience. I always hoped he would give me an old paint pot but he never did.

  The other houses were thatch over bamboo, or mud houses. Some of the mud houses were splashed with indigo dye and I thought they were beautiful, blue like jheel water on a thundery day. Monsoons were hard on these houses though, ones that were not pukka-built like ours. In bad years some were swept away by the rising waters and people had to splash down the lane, up to their knees in the brown floodwater, in a desperate search for their cushions and beds, boxes and ovens. Once from our roof, I was thrilled to see a swan float past with its big black feet on an English table top.

  “Goddess Saraswati will be proud to see her faithful friend on a royal raft,” my mother had said when I told her. But that was long ago.

  Everybody worked outside. Women came from the bazaar with huge baskets of rice, bananas or mangoes to sell, balancing these fat pyramids ever so delicately on their heads. They each had a place to sit and sell, a chosen tree that was their destination. But for us children, it was their slow walk down the lane that was important. If they put a foot down carelessly a fruit might topple off its pile. It didn’t often happen but when it did those hardworking women could do nothing but shout after us when we snatched the fruit from the ditch and ran.

  “Devils get you, little thieves!”

  A Mussulman tailor sat on a rug next door to our house, a quiet hunched little man whose needle flashed faster than a slant of rain. He kept hens and a cock, the only ones at our end of the lane. The cock called him to prayers every morning but everyone else nearby also had to rub their eyes in the darkness when that fellow hopped up on the dung pile to shout. I admired the bird, his bright colours and the bossy walk he had. He thought he was a maharajah.

  On the other side was a potter who made large brown earthenware water pots that were fired and then sold in the bazaar. He had left his own district and people whispered that it was because of a murder. At any rate he lived on his own. He shouted when children came near his row of pots and we were afraid of him. The clay he used smelled quite strong, as if it had been freshly scooped from the river. But if you could lay hands on a piece of the soft dark stuff that had fallen in the grass you could make little animals and birds and leave them to bake in the sun. So we dared his shouts.

  My usual companions were Varsha and Bashanti, who were sisters, and Dinesh, their cousin. The girls’ father kept three goats in their little yard and their job was to see that the animals got safe feeding during the day and rice water from those who would give it in the evenings. We wandered after them, keeping them out of houses but all the time watching everything that happened in the lane, collecting stories to bring home. I was desperate to make my mother smile again but even a cackle from Hemavati was a reward.

  I told them about boys who left dirty footprints on newly washed clothes spread to dry on the ground and the rocks by the water. I told them about the sadhu, the holy man dressed only in a string, who stood on one leg under the peepul tree for a whole day until sunset came. He kept his heavy matted hair off his shoulders with a trident that looked sharp enough to kill, yet a tailorbird had landed on it and picked straws from his head. I told them how Bashanti’s father beat her when she tied nutshells round her ankles and started dancing outside her house. I even told lies about the monkeys, just to keep Hemavati happy. These were little brown monkeys, smaller than cats, that lived in the ruined temple up by the roadside. They took turns swarming down one lane after another. I told her about babies bitten and pots of rice carried off into the trees. But really the monkeys were like children, like us. The harm they did was very little and most people felt they were lucky creatures. I thought they liked to see what we were doing just as much as we liked to watch them.

  I soon noticed that Dinesh made his own journeys, ones that were not mapped out by goats. Every day he went past the last house and beyond, heading for wherever there might be stands of trees left, away from the lanes. His job was to gather neem and tulsi twigs and other leaves for the apothecaries in the bazaar. Dinesh had the most beautiful white teeth I had ever seen. This, he told us, was because he cleaned his teeth with the very thinnest neem twigs. He gave me some for myself.

  My teeth were fine, I thought, but I envied Dinesh his long walks by the river channels. He would see birds, I thought, though he never mentioned them and I was too shy to ask him what else he saw besides trees.

  I was getting tired of the goats and of never leaving the lane. I missed the trips my mother and I used to make, and not only the ones we shared with my father. Sometimes I went round the back of our house before Varsha and Bashanti had left their yard to come along towards ours, and I climbed the steps to our roof. I could hear Hemavati shouting through the open door at them.

  “She’s gone, ages ago! That one rises early!”

  Kneeling so that I was hidden from below, I could see all the way up the lane. It was here that I used to wait for my father’s visits. Underneath, I knew the two girls would trudge along by the sluice ditches, after the goats-with-no-names. There would be washing and cooking and babies to watch but I had a taste for something different, something further away.

  Those mornings, when I saw Hemavati leave to go up to the stalls, I would come down again and slip back inside the house. I sat beside my mother on the bed, and stroked her arms or her hair, glad to have her to myself. I would take out my book of stories, written in my father’s clear hand, and read her one. They were all her own stories, of course, but now she was taking no pleasure in them, none that I could see anyway.

  I was just a child. I thought that if my mother stirred, and was herself again, then surely our life would soon fit back into the picture I could recognize, with everything in the correct proportions. The people who used to be big – my father, my mother – would be their proper size again, not shrunken, not invisible.

  And Hemavati? That was a difficult question. Hemavati had turned into a larger person than I had thought she was. I would have to find a new place for her in our picture.

  But did I believe then that my father was gone? Not truly, not yet.

  ANOUSH’S CHRISTMAS

  “HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!”

  At first I thought the choir was singing out Miss Hickey’s word, loolally, which did not seem right for church. But no, all the little boys who were standing in front of the altar stalls had their mouths open on a lovelier word, a word that sounded like birdsong. The boys were dressed in loose white lace kurtas and long red skirts. They looked like littl
e Christian angels and their high voices sounded like my mother when she sang panchali or her father’s boat song.

  Anoush and I were wearing our favourite saris, she in pink and I in my blue, sitting in a pew at the back of the church. We were squashed in with the English maidservants and some of the wives and daughters who were half-Indian like me. So Anoush and I were not the only ones to smother a giggle at the bosomy dresses that flounced down the centre aisle after the service.

  Outside, in the shade of the wide yellow-stone porch there were groups of officers and soldiers, men in sober black suits and others in breeches and coats of every colour. But there was no Mr Walker. I surveyed every face.

  I saw the reverend though, reaching dutifully for people’s hands and petting children’s heads. He was as hairy as ever, which was a disappointment, somehow. I did not want to catch his cold eye so I whispered to Anoush that we should squeeze through the crowd and slip away. As we left, the bells in the steeple began to peal and everyone seemed to shout louder. There were a few sympathetic eyes for Anoush and her limp and some greetings too, but she took a firm grip of my arm and marched us through the gates of the church.

  “This way I can walk as well as any cavalry wife in a frock,” she said, squeezing me.

  She steered me towards the grassy stretch in front of the Esplanade where we would take our picnic and watch the horsemen and the carriages, the children running with their kites and all the others who were celebrating their Christmas out of doors in the winter sunshine.

  “Let’s sit close to those people,” Anoush said.

  If I was the one to spot birds, Anoush could spot people. She had picked out an English family party. Two ladies in dark wool dresses and a grey-haired man in a plain black suit had settled themselves on cushions round a rug. On the rug was a beautiful baby girl with fair curls, playing with a doll that was bigger than she was. Two boys were playing leapfrog close by, with one of the family’s bearers helping the smaller boy clamber over his brother. Another bearer was unpacking food from a large tiffin box and putting it out onto china plates.

  “I’d like to see who they are,” said Anoush. “I’ve never seen them before but they look like a comfortable family. If I can hear their name then I can tell Auntie about them and she can send them a card.”

  “Anoush, you mustn’t think of work today! It’s your holiday.”

  “Don’t think for one moment that I will not remember that, Anila.” She smiled. “And I’ll remember the river always. But it’s good to look at people too.”

  Earlier this morning Anoush had squealed with horror when I suggested we wash ourselves in the river, which ran clean and cool just beyond the fence. But when she saw that my feet were standing firm on sand and not on the back of some monster of the river, she bent some reeds over, sat down and dabbled her toes in. Then she leant over and scooped up water to splash her face and neck.

  “It’s got salt in it, like soup!”

  She took so much pleasure out of that simple wash in the river water. I thought how my mother would have been proud of me.

  Now I was thirsty.

  We spread out our own picnic on top of my cloth bag. Rice with spices, Armenian bread, bananas, cake. A green coconut that we would have to break open somehow, for its juice, for I had forgotten my knife. Otherwise it was a long walk over to the Chowringhee tanks and the guards there might turn me away, for badness.

  “Anoush, I’m going to see if I can find something to crack this open.”

  The family near us had also begun to take their food but I had noticed they had only small tea knives. But a little way off, behind some trees, a new wall was going up, and surely I might find a sharp stone or stray piece of metal there.

  That was where I was when I saw the beginnings of what happened.

  I turned round, first because of the noise, the loud pounding of horses in the distance, galloping very fast, tearing up the earth as they moved. Two soldiers chasing each other, or chasing something else, and shouting, holding long sticks out by the sides of their horses.

  Then I saw him. The smaller boy just stepped away from his family, the way a baby goat does, or a fawn. Nobody was watching him to make him stop. He had a funny, stout walk, almost a run, and he too was chasing something. He was heading straight into the path of the horses as if he did not hear the thunder of their hooves. And the riders were looking away, they must have been, because they did not rein in or change their course. They came on.

  But Anoush had seen him. I heard her call. “Stop!” It must have hurt her throat and chest so very much if I could hear that cry so clearly where I was. But nothing stopped. Everything just continued, horribly, as if it was a dream. Why did nobody see him?

  I dropped the silly coconut and hitched my sari up to run but I was too far away to be useful. That small boy was going to die, I could see that. I shouted too. That was when I saw Anoush push herself up from the ground with her stick. She couldn’t run of course, but she dived forward onto the ground instead, she spread herself flat out and shot forward that long stick of hers so that it fell like a spear between the little boy’s legs.

  Down he came, flat on his face, only a few lengths of his little body away from the cruel hooves. I could see his mouth opening but there was no cry I could hear.

  The father and the bearers were running now too but I was the first to reach the little boy. I picked him up and felt the harsh gasps and gulps as his chest rose and fell. He was a pretty one, fair-haired with curls, but his face was streaked with dirt and tears and his little white breeches were quite torn away in front. I handed him to his father who stood, rocking him, petting his face, kissing his head. The bearers looked grey and shaky. I glared at them. Why was everybody here so foolish?

  Just beyond the trees the horses were pulled up now, with shouts, and then turned to trot back to us. The two soldiers jumped down and while one stood holding the reins, the other ran after me to where Anoush lay. Her legs were twisted to one side and she was breathing hard. He helped her very gently to her feet and then went to pick up her stick.

  “Anoush, are you all right? Are you hurt?” I whispered, holding her.

  She shook her head but she kept her hands folded over her chest and there were tears in her eyes. I lifted her hands away and there it was, her beautiful pink embroidered sari in shreds down her front and every part of her covered in earth and grime.

  “It’s not the sari, I promise you,” she said. She clasped the torn cloth again. “That doesn’t matter. It’s just that it was such a difficult thing to make my stick fly like that. It might not have worked.”

  She began to tremble and I put my arms round her.

  “Miss, you saved the little boy’s life,” said the soldier standing with the horses. “We didn’t see him until the very end, he was that low down and you can’t see that patch from the saddle. And we were all wrapped up in our mountainy game – we saw nobody until you fell forward.”

  “Anoush, you are wonderful,” I whispered.

  “That she is, my dear, that she is,” said the father, who came up beside us. The mother and the other woman now had the little boy between them and they were hugging and kissing him, while the older boy held the baby.

  “My younger son is deaf,” said the father. “We think he saw something he wanted and he went after it when we were all occupied. He never saw the horses and of course he couldn’t hear them.”

  The other soldier came back with Anoush’s stick and handed it to her. He clicked his heels together so hard that the spurs on his boots jangled. Anoush flashed him a smile then, a shaky one. He was a very young soldier, so young that he looked as if he still had growing to do. He had black hair and such very pale skin that I guessed he had not been long in India.

  “My dear, you must tell me your name,” said the father to Anoush. “We have so much – no, everything – to thank you for. You must come home with us straightaway, for I am a physician and can attend to any injuries. We will of cou
rse replace your damaged garment.”

  Anoush made a little gesture as if to say, no, no trouble please, but I was not going to have that. My friend should have her due.

  “Her name is Miss Anoush Galustaun and after Christmas is over you will be able to find her in Mrs Panossian’s emporium off the Esplanade. That’s the favourite store for the English in Calcutta, you’ll discover very soon.”

  The father looked at me in amazement.

  “We are just lately arrived in the city, but you seem to have divined that. Please let me introduce our family. I am George Herbert. And this is my wife, Mrs Charlotte Herbert, and my sister Miss Sarah Herbert. My sons John and Christopher, whom we call Kit, and my infant daughter, Georgiana.”

  His wife grasped Anoush’s hands as if she would never let them go. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said. The little boy, Kit, kept his face buried in his aunt’s neck but then he looked up at Anoush and smiled.

  “I’m so glad I was here,” she said.

  The two riders apologized again for their lack of care and made to get on their horses. I could see that the young soldier desperately wanted Anoush to look at him and acknowledge him but she was busy playing peep with little Kit. She turned though, as they trotted off, and gave him a little bow, with joined hands, a true namashkar, something I had never seen Anoush do before.

  “I see the carriage coming now,” said the doctor. “Our driver, at least, knows his business. You must come and be attended to and then I will have you returned to your home.”

  The women nodded and smiled and the aunt said something about having a dress that would fit Anoush. But Anoush looked at me, her eyes huge and urgent, and she gave a tiny shake of her head. I knew then that she wanted us to return to the garden house, to be on our own, to be quiet after this alarm.

  “We live a long way distant, in Garden Reach,” I said. “But if you could take us to the Chandpal Ghat that would be a great kindness, for we might take a boat there.”